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After two-and-a-half years, 572 posts, and a lot of late nights that could have been spent watching Letterman, AOTW will enter a permanent hiatus. It's been a fun journey, traversing an ecletic range of topics in a way that impressed some and bemused many. I've said plenty of things that I'm proud of, and a few that I regret, but either way I've enjoyed the process of finding my own voice and claiming a small soapbox as my very own.

I've been debating with myself whether or not to take the AOTW archive off-line. In the end I think I'll keep it accessible, both because of the reality that once something is published it can never really be unpublished, and because I think readers are intelligent enough to realise that one's past can never be a guide to one's future.

Now I'm moving on to greener pastures, having started this week as a trainee reporter at one of Australia's most influential newspapers. The blogosphere is regularly gloating over th…

On Saturday I returned from my five week sojourn to the United States. Whilst I landed with the best intentions in the world to share my wild ride with my blog-post parched readers over the weekend, I ended up doing rather more pedestrian things, like overcoming jetlag and shopping for groceries. Come Monday, I commenced my new job (more on that soon) and so my opportunities to write about the trip are rather limited.

So, rather than the careful, sober analysis that such a trip deserves, I offer up a few random thoughts on things that captured my imagination.

The United States is a sick society, caught up in a pique of hyper-consumerism in an unsuccessful attempt to fill the psychological void of post-industrialism. It's nothing new to suggest that literally everything is for sale in the US, but it's still unnerving to see it close up.

A few examples help illustrate the point.

Inside many trains on the New York subway is wall-to-wall advertising for self-improvement of all k…